Nanotechnology/Transcript
Transcript Text reads: The Mysteries of Life with Tim and Moby. A robot, Moby, is dressed as a carnival barker with a straw hat and fake moustache. The table next to him is covered with miniature carnival rides. A sign over the table reads, "Moby's Nano-Circus. Admission: Five Dollars." A boy, Tim, walks in and frowns. TIM: Moby! You know that flea circuses are fake. You can't train bugs to do tricks. You're just trying to fool people and take their money! MOBY: Beep! Moby hands Tim a magnifying glass. Tim examines the circus and sees small robots doing tricks. TIM: Whoa. Tim reads from a typed letter. TIM: Dear Tim and Moby, What is nanotechnology? From, Mary. An animation shows two turning gears made out of molecules. TIM: Nanotechnology is the science of controlling matter at a really small scale. Through nanotechnology, scientists can manipulate and build stuff out of molecules and even individual atoms! MOBY: Beep? TIM: Well, the "nano" part of nanotechnology refers to the size of a nanometer. A nanometer is one-billionth of a meter. An image represents the length of one nanometer. MOBY: Beep. TIM: I know. It's kind of hard to imagine how small that is. Think of it like this: a sheet of paper is one hundred thousand nanometers thick. An image shows a sheet of lined notebook paper. An inset bubble magnifies a side view of the paper to show its thickness. MOBY: Beep! TIM: Yeah—a nanometer is ridiculously small. People have been trying to cut matter down into smaller and smaller parts for centuries. But ideas for nanotechnology really started to take off in the 1950s. The structure of the DNA molecule was discovered in 1953, which sent scientists' minds racing. An image shows a strand of DNA. TIM: American physicist Richard Feynman was inspired by how such a tiny package contained the instructions for building an organism. In 1959, Feynman challenged his colleagues to build nanothings! An image shows Richard Feynman holding a piece of chalk. MOBY: Beep? TIM: Well, like, he suggested it should be possible to build a motor that was one-sixty-fourth of an inch long. And to create a page of a book that was one-twenty-five-thousandth the size of a normal page! MOBY: Beep? TIM: Yeah, eventually—the motor was made a year later, and the book page was done in 1985! Images show a miniature motor and a miniature book page. MOBY: Beep? TIM: To read the page, scientists needed a microscope many thousands of times more powerful than the ones you use in science class. An image shows the magnified first page of A Tale of Two Cities, by Charles Dickens. TIM: In this case, they used a scanning electron microscope. An image shows the electron microscope. TIM: Electron microscopes produce three-dimensional images of the atoms that make up a material's surface. An image shows what atoms look like through an electronic microscope. TIM: One type of electron microscope, called the scanning tunneling microscope, or STM, is particularly cool, and helpful for nanotechnology. An animation shows a scanning tunneling microscope. TIM: An STM uses an extremely fine point, a single atom wide, to push other atoms around. By changing substances at the atomic level, scientists can have complete control over a material's properties! Stuff like a substance's boiling point, melting point, ability to be magnetized, how much electrical charge it can hold…almost anything can be changed. Icons appear onscreen to represent boiling point, melting point, magnetic potential, and electrical charge. TIM: And scientists are hoping to use nanotechnology to build nano-sized robots, or nanobots, which could be programmed to do all sorts of useful stuff. They could be made to travel through the bloodstream, detecting and killing cancer cells without damaging any of the surrounding tissues. An animation shows a group of nanobots slowly moving through a human vein. TIM: Or engineers could make little molecular traps that destroy pollutants in the water and in the air. An animation shows a group of round nanobots in the air. One eats a small particle of pollution. TIM: Or builders could put millions of sensors into building materials that can tell us when there's structural damage. And later deploy tiny robots to repair any damage when it occurs! An animation shows detection devices clinging to a building's surface. A crack appears in the surface, which sets off the device's alarm. Another nanobot arrives to repair the damage. MOBY: Beep! TIM: Right, the idea is to build materials with an unimaginable level of precision. An animation shows two turning gears made out of molecules. TIM: For one thing, by controlling the size and shape of things down to the smallest molecule, nanotechnology will greatly reduce the waste and pollution created in manufacturing. Today, we build a car by cutting large pieces of metal and plastic down to size, which creates a lot of waste. An animation shows lasers cutting a car door out of a sheet of metal. A large piece of unused metal falls to the ground. TIM: But tomorrow, we could build a car by growing pieces of metal and plastic to exactly the right size and shape. An animation shows small bits of material combining to form a car door. MOBY: Beep? TIM: Well, like many scientific advances, nanotechnology does have a downside. Some people are worried that machines made on such small scales could be used against us for things like weapons, or even deadly viruses. An image shows a swarm of nanobots attacking a city. People scream and flee in terror. TIM: These are all real issues that have to be addressed. But there's no doubt that nanotechnology is coming—and that it will greatly influence our lives. Now, about those nanobots you have—how many of them did you build? MOBY: Beep! TIM: They're all over the house? Nanobots gather underneath Tim's shoes and lift him off the ground. TIM: You're sure they're friendly? MOBY: Beep. The nanobots quickly carry Tim away. TIM: Aaah! They don't seem friendly at all!Category:BrainPOP Science Transcripts Category:BrainPOP Transcripts